Who the Rack Makes
by feralhand
Summary: Dean sat long, with his legs stretched out and his body reclined, upon a throne built of his most favorite pieces. There was a mouth here, a spine there, and something black and yellow and fluttering in the bottom of his eye. Sometimes, he thought it felt exactly how he wanted it to feel. / Season 4 lead-in AU rambling oneshot feat. demon!Dean


Author's Note: Written back in July, revised in October, and posted just now. Yeaaaah. Not sure there's any interest in wicked demon!Dean.

* * *

The acoustic genius of Hell was overlooked by most of its denizens. Thunderous drumming filled the air, entraining the hearts of the damned into a racing tempo. Gasping breaths flitted in the space between the booms. And then, there were the screams...

At first, it was deafening. Then, quickly, it was maddening. After forty years, Dean picked out the nuances of the din without thinking. It was a residual behavior from a lifetime ago. His survival was no longer dependent upon detecting monsters before they could sneak up behind him, but he didn't know how to stop listening. He tried not to hear the sounds in the dark, when the rack swayed empty and his bloody hands were idle. He tried, but he could never quite lose that part of himself, no matter how much it no longer fit into what had become of him.

He sat long, with his legs stretched out and his body reclined, upon a throne built of his most favorite pieces. There was a mouth here, a spine there, and something black and yellow and fluttering in the bottom of his eye. Hell was abstract and concrete at once, and Dean had grown accustomed to the feeling of being and not being at the same time and at no time and forever. Sometimes, he thought, matching his blackened palm against an almost complete set of pale fingers, it felt exactly how he wanted it to feel.

The torture quarter had a rhythm all its own. Dean understood by the dissonance in the air coming across his dungeon that something was different. It wasn't just today, it was this moment. This one, here.

There was a demon at his door; and maybe, for just this one moment, a shadow of a former life fell across Dean's face and he remembered all his fear and loathing for black eyes, and then for himself. Dean's eyes switch color just like that, in a blink, easy as pie.

This demon was a young thing in more ways than one. He was new smoke. Their memory tended to lack. The shape he was trying to hold was a jumble of flickering images, half young man on a bad night in Tijuana and half monster shining in burning bullets from over the wall. His smile was like gunfire, unsteady and uncontained in the meager space of his face.

Dean thought he might like to replicate the concept with his next victim. "My door is always open," he said, chuckling to himself at his own sudden desire for a camera.

No place in Hell was welcoming. Dean's chamber was not an exception, but it did see far and away the most traffic. Dean figured company kept him sane while he wasn't working his infernal tools into the next soul to come up the line.

"No news on the traitor," the demon chittered, taking a jagged step onto the floor. His body, or excuse for a body, curved in relation to the gust of hellhounds bursting through the hall in his wake.

The hounds entered the dungeon. Dean's displeasure was scalded on his face. Hellhounds, like rats, went where ever they wanted to go. It was difficult to argue with a six foot tall bear trap of a demon.

There were things in the dungeon Dean needed not to be found, however, when he went to dig into his stash of virginal viscera to tempt the hounds away, he found it empty. Oh, if he hadn't always known gluttony would be his downfall. He slumped back in his throne and shot his guest a look of languor.

The demon boy was there a half-second later, moving like black lightning. He swung down on his knees in the roiling pools where Dean's boots where evermore fused with the floor of the blood caked dungeon. He arced over Dean's lap and caressed him in ways that would affect a cruel and unusual death in a place where the laws of reality weren't as fluid as they were in Hell.

Dean couldn't bring himself to care. "I don't want to see your face—" he growled, his line of sight falling distractedly off to one side, "or what's left of it—again, until you can give me Ruby's location." There was some noise, out there, deeper in the Pit. It sounded almost musical.

The hounds, in all corners of the room, suddenly shrieked as if struck. For a split second, Dean felt fear like he hadn't in ages. He worried that the dogs had found something, but when they barreled out of the room, they carried nothing with them. He settled his panic and told himself he'd get Alastair in here later and find out what he was up to.

"But, the Inquisitor told me you'd like to hear about this child of Azazel's—"

Dean's claws sunk into the boy's throat the very instant that name breached his lips. The speechlessness he affected thereafter wasn't his intention. Dean forgot how easily things broke. His thoughts were wholly consumed with the catastrophe it would be if this news had anything to do with Sam. He was _not_ ready for Sam to be here in Hell. There was still _so much_ to be done.

The boy gurgled sulfur and sound to the tune of, "_Meg_."

And this had nothing to do with Sam after all. Dean was relieved and disappointed. He scowled. "Alive?"

"Lying low, by all accounts, but—" and the boy was squelched again.

Dean turned. The choke of the lackey in his hand was the last noise to touch Dean's mind. Sometime, in the past ten seconds, the tumultuous roar of eternity ceased. Suddenly, Hell gaped with dead silence.

Dean let the boy filter through his fingers like sand onto the floor, and then he moved with a mix of curiosity and terror to the rusting wall of his dungeon. His boneless legs sucked at the floor as a soundless rumble came up the throat of Hell. What began as a small vibration evolved into a cataclysmic spasm in the framework of the dungeon, shaking loose bindings and overturning the rack. Through the sick-slick bars of the window, the wide open dark exploded with bright white light.

* * *

Freezing cold and breathless in a room that smelled like hard water, Dean came back to reality. Castiel's presence naturally followed the hazy scene playing in his head, but Dean still jumped.

"What were you... dreaming about?"

There was an angel in Dean's bed. He would be laughing if he could get a good breath. Just, the way Castiel looks at him always makes him feel like his chest is full of smoke. It wasn't, anymore. It wasn't. It wasn't. It wasn't.

Dean fought off the urge to flinch away from the gaze of the divine. Instead, he stared back with a challenge in his eyes and a slow taunt in his throat, asking, "you get your freak on by watching other people sleep?"

There was a warning flash of holy wrath in the angel's eyes. Dean considered it a victory. He wanted to know how far he could push Castiel. Angels were so rigid. Dean looked forward to the bend. He wondered which of the two of them would break in the end.

Castiel looked away.

Eyestrain in a dark motel room earned neither of them anything in the way of knowing just how long their armistice would last. Ultimately, instinctively, they fell back on a timeless truth: Angels. Demons. Enemies. Always.


End file.
